In the continued drive to cut costs, companies and firms have employed software tools to manage and monitor various types of expenditures. For example, to manage expenditures for corporate meetings and conferences, software packages have been developed that allow managers to set departmental budgets for specific meeting events, track employee expenditures, allocate expenditures against the budgets and perform reconciliation. In addition, to further promote control over expenditures for meetings, issuers of financial presentation devices have now issued meeting accounts (e.g., meeting cards) which may have preset expenditure limits and be authorized for purchases only through specified vendors.
To set up a meeting event, a manager would use a meeting management software program to enter the details of the meeting event. Thereafter, the manager would contact the issuer of a meeting card to request a meeting card account. When the account details are provided by the issuer, the manager would then enter the information to associate that card account to the meeting event. The manual process of contacting the issuer to request a meeting card and then associating it to a meeting event is time consuming and cumbersome, and may lead to errors.
It would therefore be desirable to provide a platform that could interact with third party software platforms and the issuer of the meeting card in an integrated and automated manner.